The Starting Round of ASEAN Student Contest on Information Security 2022

The Starting Round of the contest was held on the morning of September 24th,2022 in the form of online competition, with the participation of 161 teams from 51 universities and colleges of Vietnam and schools of ASEAN countries (besides Vietnam, there are 07 ASEAN countries participating with 56 teams from 22 universities.In Vietnam, there are 105 teams from 29 colleges, universities and academies).

Mr. Vu Quoc Thanh, Vice Chairman and General Secretary of VNISA with the opening speech

Speaking at the opening of the round, Mr. Vu Quoc Thanh, Vice President and General Secretary of VNISA emphasized that this year the number of Vietnamese teams and the number of foreign teams are more than in previous years.

Mr. Thanh also said that on the occasion of the 15th contest, the Organizing Committee has increased the number and value of prizes higher than previous years.The total prize value is 200 million VND, of which the first prize is worth 30 million VND.

The subcommittee organizing supervises the online teams

Immediately after Mr. Vu Quoc Thanh’s opening speech, the teams actively solved the challenges of the test. In total, the Starting Round has 10 challenges with average difficulty in topics such as: Pwnable (exploiting software errors, buffer overflow, format string, shellcode…); Reverse engineering (software source code reverse engineering, unpacking the packers, crypters to protect the software); Web (Web application attack techniques); Network/Forensic (Investigate, analyze, trace digital cases); Crypto/ACM (Decode puzzles, attack cryptographic algorithms, use programming/algorithmic skills to solve games, mazes…).

Online teams

After 2 hours, which is about half of the time, more than 100 teams scored points, of which the top 5 positions were fierce competition of 5 teams from National University of Singapore, Academy of Cryptography Techniques, Duy Tan University, University of Information Technology and Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology.

Team KMA.L3N0V0 from Academy of Cryptography Techniques was the first team to overcome all the challenges after nearly 3 hours of competition.The final result was 136 teams scoring points, of which 6 teams solved all the challenges of the test, the top 5 positions were: KMA.L3N0V0 (Academy of Cryptography Techniques), UIT.Boomerang (University of Information Technology), Singapwners (National University of Singapore), ISIT-DTU1 (Duy Tan University), KMA.lostQ (Academy of Cryptography Techniques).

Standings of teams at the end of the Starting Round (see more at https://warmup.ascis.vn/scoreboard)

After the Starting Round, the teams entered the Qualifying Round on October 15th,2022 (group VN1 will compete in Hanoi, group VN2 will compete in Ho Chi Minh City, ASEAN group will compete online).The Final Round will be held on November 5th, 2022 with the presence of the top 20 teams of 3 Qualifying groups: 5 teams from group VN1, 5 teams from group VN2 and 10 teams from group ASEAN (Vietnamese teams will compete in Hanoi, ASEAN teams will compete online).